


Sleepless

by DeCarabas



Category: Terminator (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:35:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2823614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has this nightmare sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleepless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yukito](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yukito/gifts).



John has this nightmare sometimes. Not that that's unusual—but it's this one nightmare in particular that gets to him. And he knows why he has it, it's easy to explain away, easy to map every detail to the things he's seen and the stresses of the day, and he figures that ought to make the dream stop, message received—but hey, half the time it feels like he can't get anything in the waking world to work like it should, so why should his own subconscious be any different, right?

The nightmare goes like this.

He's fighting, and whatever he does, it's never enough. And he thinks to himself, _I need to be better than this_. And as he's fighting, he sees his hand—only it's not his hand anymore, it's a mess of metal and wire. And then it's in his chest, a sheet of metal armor beneath the skin. And he knows his mind's next, and he knows that once it gets that far, there'll be no difference between him and them.

That's where he always wakes up.

And when he wakes up, Kate’s already awake. Every time. And the room’s dark most of the time, wherever they’re staying right then, but he can still see her watching him, her hair falling forward. And he feels the weight of her on his chest, holding him in place. There’s a gun carefully positioned just barely beyond arm’s reach, but he doesn’t have to reach for it, because Kate’s here and she’s not moving, there’s no emergency, nothing’s wrong. Nothing more than usual, anyway. And he listens to the sound of her breath, and his breath, until his starts to even out, until the sound of their breathing starts to match. And he takes her hand and presses it to his lips.

And then she says to him, “Where are we?” Her voice is low, quiet. It’s a ritual.

And most of the time he can answer her. But sometimes they’ve been too many places in too few days on too little sleep, spent too much time holed up halfway between one base and another. So she tells him where they are. And between the sound of her voice and his, they talk about the here and the now, and for just a little while that’s all there is. No past, no future filling up his head. Just here and now, for however long they’re lying in bed together.

It never seems to last quite long enough.


End file.
